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                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 4TH NOVEMBER, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: You have been saved.
   DATE: Sat  4 Nov 15:38:48 GMT 2017

Tuesday saw the Halloween release of WolfMUD v0.0.8. A Halloween release has
its benefits — if you hear screaming, just put it down to people having fun
rather than a botched release ;)

For now I have put aside adding lighting to WolfMUD. Instead I’m working on
adding marshalling to all of the attributes I’ve implemented so far. This will
allow players to save their character along with their inventory — making
WolfMUD actually playable.

One omission of the previous WolfMUD — and probably one of the most frequently
asked for features — was the lack of persistence of the world. That is, to be
able to save and reload the current state of the world. The reason it wasn’t
implemented? I didn’t think of it. By the time people started asking for the
feature, development had progressed too far, making retro fitting persistence
incredibly difficult.

Persisting the world also raises some issues. How do you make changes to it?
By allowing existing zones to be reloaded? What if you want finer control? For
example to fix or modify a single item? Note that WolfMUD adopted a policy
early on of not modifying items belonging to players. Over time older versions
of an item become rare, almost like collectables. It should also be noted that
players get their own, unique copy of items — unless an item is  already
unique. This feature opens up the possibility for players to customise and
modify their items.

Speaking of player items and unique items, WolfMUD players have always had a
split inventory, consisting of permanent items and temporary items[1]. The
reason for this is simple practicality. Permanent items are those owned by the
player and are saved when a player exits the game. Temporary items are usually
unique and serve a specific purpose in the game.

An example of unique items are those required to solve puzzles. If these
unique items were allowed to be removed by players then other players would
not be able to solve the puzzles. WolfMUD gets around this issue by making
such items temporary in the sense that players cannot keep them. If a player
is in possession of such a temporary item when they exit the world the item is
dropped. After a period of time the item would be cleaned up and reset for
other players to find.

This raises the question of what determines that an item is temporary? The
Java version determined temporary items based on the clean up and reset
attributes. Not an ideal solution as creators had to understand the ‘rules’
for items — which were fuzzy at best. This time I’m thinking of having two,
very simple rules:


  1. If an item does not have a clean up or reset attribute it is unique and
     temporary as it cannot be disposed of or reset.

  2. If an item has attribute marking it as unique — not implemented yet — it
     is temporary.


Rule 1 can be easily implemented by automatically adding a unique attribute to
items with no clean up or reset attributes.

--
Diddymus

  [1] The Java version actually listed permanent and temporary items as
      two separate lists for the (INV)ENTORY command. For this version I’m
      thinking of just adding a marker beside temporary items.


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